Marcello Carlin and Lena Friesen review every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it

Sunday, 12 October 2014

U2: The Joshua Tree

(#343: 21 March
1987, 2 weeks)

Track listing:
Where The Streets Have No Name/I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For/With
Or Without You/Bullet The Blue Sky/Running To Stand Still/Red Hill Mining
Town/In God’s Country/Trip Through Your Wires/One Tree Hill/Exit/Mothers Of The
Disappeared

“I’m looking for something.

Someone who wants to see and can.

Nothing’salive
anymore.

Is this the universal plan?

And I can see ahead my eyes are infinite.

Speaking with the dead but nothing’s definite.”

(Annette Peacock, “A Loss Of Consciousness,” 1968)

You know the story – how a rock singer travelled the
world, on tour with his group or on humanitarian fact-finding missions to
Ethiopia, El Salvador and Nicaragua, experienced, saw, heard and read about one
America while dreaming of another, and then came back to Dublin only to find
the same desert around him wherever he went, a metaphorical desert which, even
at home, told him that there was no longer a place called home, that this was a
destroyed or destroying world in which nothing could grow, and left him with
the question of how to survive in a world which was almost totally against him.

Was it 1986 or 2014? The same villains and culprits, but
with different names; a common cause for the blood, suffering and deaths. The Joshua Tree is the story of an
attempt by that rock group to make, or persuade, something grow in this desert.

Like The Unforgettable Fire, Eno and Lanois were more or less in charge; they
oversaw the recording on an alternating weekly shift basis. Unlike The Unforgettable Fire, the group wanted
to make more tangible songs about things that mattered to them. Anecdotally,
the division of labour seems to have been as before, the balance slightly
weighed in favour of Lanois, although the band called in Steve Lillywhite at a
very late stage, and much to the two producers’ chagrin, to remix three songs
with a view to making them stand out more on the radio, as singles, although he
did not remix “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and remixed the
album-only “Bullet The Blue Sky.” The final running order, subject to Bono’s
insistence that “Streets” and “Mothers” should top and tail the record, was
decided by Lillywhite’s wife, Kirsty MacColl.

Despite this, The
Joshua Tree largely sounds like an Eno-dominant record, whereas Robbie
Robertson’s eponymous debut solo album, released a few months later, and partly
involving U2, was unmistakably a Lanois job. Moreover, it sounds like one of
Eno’s ambient studies which continually gets gatecrashed by a rock group. Hence
the residual drift from Apollo which
slowly sails into sight at the album’s beginning is eventually joined, and then
superseded, by the Edge’s urgent, delay echo-aided, high-toned six-note guitar
arpeggio, Mullen’s thunderous drumming and Clayton’s Jah Wobble-ish bass; it is
unrealistic to expect the U2 of 1986 to have been aware of Acid House,
something that only began to gain popularity slightly later in 1987, but there
is that same hyperactive propulsion, the need not to stop moving.

Lyrically there are enough winds, storms, nails, stones, poison
and rain in this record to fill several Bibles. But it’s clear from Bono’s
delivery that he is running away from
something; so he is not merely thinking of the unnamed streets of the parched
backlands of Ethiopia, but of the streets in Belfast where people can be named
and their religion identified on the basis of the street in which they live.
The song’s proposal, if we take Bono’s “you” as meaning “us,” is for humanity
to rip it up and start again.

“I Still Haven’t Found…” is half the speed, but Mullen’s
very familiar drumming tattoo puts us in mind of a sequel to “Sunday Bloody
Sunday,” and while I am sure that Eno, a devotee of gospel music, prodded the
group to record a gospel song (“You say you’re Christians – well, here’s your
chance to prove it!,” although Bono was at the time listening to groups like
the Swan Silvertones), this remains a song of profound doubt. In spite of all
the torment the singer puts himself through, we are back in the land of “My
Elusive Dreams,” and Bono’s is an uncertainty which even the backing “choir”
(multitracked Edge, Lanois and instantly recognisable Eno) cannot assuage. If
anything, the most telling musical commentary here is made by the Edge, whose
guitar growls and swoops like an onomatopoeic heir to Keith Levene – despite
all the talk about going back to roots, this remains post-punk music.

Likewise, “With Or Without You” builds up slowly and
patiently, the Edge deploying Michael Brook’s “infinite guitar” to create
drones and atmospherics rather than soloing or riffing as such – I read
somewhere that one major influence on the Edge’s playing during this period was
Bill Frisell, and if you listen to the latter’s work on two other important
1987 releases, Power Tools’ Strange
Meeting and John Zorn’s Spillane,
there are definite affinities – with Bono sounding remarkably like Ian
McCulloch (“With Or Without You” is on record as being the first U2 song that
McCulloch liked!). Is he singing about a lover, or his audience, or his music,
or to God? As his suffering incrementally increases, the musicpatiently gathers in intensity, before
bursting open – this is where Lillywhite comes in – before settling down again,
away from the foreground.

The nearest that the Edge comes to playing a “solo” is on
“Bullet The Blue Sky,” but again he goes for swooping downward runs – like the
eagle come to peck the last bones out of Reagan’s America – or lines of
feedback and sustain which stop just short of chaos. Bono solemnly sings, then
breathlessly narrates a dream ofAmerica versus what Reagan ‘s administration
was actually doing to the people of El Salvador, as though the idyll is
repeatedly being interrupted, intruded upon, by a money-mad gangster. Aided by
Mullen’s clattering drum figures, which could have come from the introduction
to Elvis Costello’s “I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea,” we have to realise that
what we are witnessing here is a remoulding of rock which doesn’t have any
clear precedents, and is different in kind to what the Smiths and New Order are
doing. “Bullet” sounds like the middle section of “Whole Lotta Love” stripped
of all machoness and posturing – reducing rock, or enlarging it, with the aim
of making “rock music” exceed itself. When Bono speaks of the howling women and
children running into the arms of America, and the music dissolves, we think of
that last line’s double meaning where “arms” could mean weapons – it is one of
the most chilling final moments in any rock music (see also “America Is
Waiting,” the opening track of Eno and Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts).

But side one ends, or culminates in, piano, with occasional
stray pedal steel and harmonica figures, as though heard from six floors above,
and the numbing requiem “Running To Stand Still,” about a couple, hopelessly
addicted to heroin, in Dublin’s Ballymun flats, around which the young Bono played
as a child (“I see seven towers, but I only see one way out”). You go all around
the world, but always end up where you started because you cannot escape
yourself. The rhythm section rumbles in for a brief spell to remind us that
once the Velvet Underground recorded a song called “Heroin,” but otherwise the
landscape, and the protagonists’ lives, steadily diminish – and not once does
the singer call moral judgment on their plight. I note the scat refrain which
may derive from “Whiskey In The Jar” and wonder whether the band had Phil
Lynott in mind.

If side one had all “the hits,” then side two goes
somewhere very different – and where have we heard that before in terms of
major rock albums involving Eno? Not so different that it jettisons lyrics, or
the group – at least not initially. But we are barely halfway through “Red Hill
Mining Town,” a more conventional, if still pained, emotive rocker which reminds
us of where people like Radiohead got their start – Bono probably means his “I’m
still waiting”s more than Diana Ross did – before synthesisers again appear on
the horizon and those booming gospel harmonies return (a brass band can also be
heard). And yet this is no cod-American mythology – the cover shots in the
desert-cum-national park (if you’re
wondering why the band look so pained, it’s because it was bloody freezing out
there when Corbijn took the photos) may actually be a red herring for the
record as a whole – since it’s a song about a community torn apart by the
1984-5 miners’ strike (based on the late Tony Parker’s observational study Red Hill: A Mining Community). Like
Parker, they take no sides – and at the time came into some criticism for not
so doing – but merely report on what they see.

“In God’s Country”,” a sceptical salute to the Statue of
Liberty, is a fine if standard example of uptempo U2. But “Trip Through Your
Wires” – salvation through love – underlines a few parallels in its 6/8 gait,
particularly the Smiths (“Back To The Old House”), the Cocteau Twins (the way
in which Mullen’s drumming is mixed, booming and cavernous) and R.E.M.; if Life’s Rich Pageant practically picked
you up in your chair, deposited you in the outside world and instructed you to
look at, appreciate and absorb it, then The
Joshua Tree ponders what you should do with the world once you’re out
there. Bono plays harmonica (in between gleeful vocal whoops) and the Edge plays
guitar as though they don’t know how to play the harmonica or the guitar (cf. Miles’
instructions to John McLaughlin on In A
Silent Way).

“One Tree Hill” is remarkable; an ode to U2 roadie Greg
Carroll, who was originally a Maori from New Zealand but was killed in a
motorcycle accident in Dublin in 1986 (and to whom the album is dedicated) sung
over what sounds like 1981 electronica, but what gradually reveals itself as
being a trio of string players (the Armin family from Toronto, no less), and
also in part a tribute to Victor Jara, Bono’s vocal goes from restrained to
disturbed to howls of uncontained grief. Some critics see Bono as the sticking
point on this record, but I can think of no other way to deliver these
thoughts, these messages – Bono, if anything, sounds more like a medium for the
words. The song ends with an electronic requiem (“Oh, great ocean…”) which is
essentially just Bono and Eno, and the parallel example of the Waterboys' This Is The Sea cannot have been far from their minds.

But “Exit” remains one of the darkest things U2 have ever
done; reconstituted by Eno from elements of a jam session, the music lurks
about in corners of night before twice breaking through into a riff so decisive,
intense and frightening that it’s little wonder that the music finally backs
away from it. The recording is like a mis-assembled jigsaw puzzle of U2 (see
also Roxy Music’s “The Bogus Man”). In the foreground, meanwhile, Bono murmurs
of – what? Who? A killer, of others or of himself? Somebody with too much
misapplied power (“So hands that build can also pull down the hands of love”)?
This is far, far away from the easy answers of “Two Hearts Beat As One.”

The closing “Mothers Of The Disappeared,” about the
bereaved mothers of the El Salvador conflict (and indirectly also the Chile
one, and there may have been others in Bono’s mind), hardly sounds like there’s
any U2 left, beginning with fourteen seconds of rain falling on a roof, and
then a melody which, although Bono came up with it in the course of writing a
song to teach the children of Ethiopia about basic hygiene, sounds, as it is
played, like an offcut from Another Green
World. As Bono urges, at the close of the song and the record, that we “see
their tears in the rainfall” – the album at times sounds like one elongated
crucifixion – and we wonder exactly where we’ve heard that combination of bass
guitar lead and drum pattern before, not to mention what is going on with the
synthesisers in the background. They come, respectively, from “Atmosphere” and “Warszawa,”
and as the song ends, U2 disappear, and we are left with the Eno record that we
had at the beginning, as though U2, and hope, were but hopeless dreams, and the
reality that, even in 1987, we couldn’t yet escape the ghost of Joy Division.

I’m sure, however, that many of the twenty-five million
people who have, to date, bought The
Joshua Tree, had another 1980 ghost in mind. Charles Shaar Murray
unhelpfully referred to them as the “Irish rock messiahs,” but the fact remains
that for an awful lot of people – both of the Joy Division (i.e. our)
generation and the Woodstock one of the sixties – The Joshua Tree’s impact was as if rock music had been saved; here,
going against all odds, was a rock group who believed in something, just as
rock groups were supposed to have done in the sixties, and were not afraid to
comment on the world around it. Many in 1987 still hadn’t got over the death of
Lennon – the Beatles’ back catalogue finally began to appear on CD throughout
the year, and Sgt Pepper very nearly
made a return visit to number one that summer – and therefore viewed The Joshua Tree as a record worthy of
what a Lennon might have done.

But the record’s ultimate importance lies in how
radically the group and its producers were prepared to reshape and recast the
basic building blocks of rock, as well as the message which it finally
conveyed, namely that even in a desert where nothing can apparently grow, and
living in a world which is almost totally against you, you still have no choice
but to do what that other Dublin fellow, Mr Beckett (eighty-one in 1987, still
alive to hear the record), proposed, namely to keep going. Its achievement is
to say that death, metaphorical or otherwise, does not have to be definite. The Joshua Tree is one of the classic
number one albums.

2 comments:

Excellent reappraisal, and certainly the radical undercurrent of the record puts the about-face of Achtung Baby in perspective. It's always annoyed me that the U2 of the 2000's have actually bought into the line that they're this earnest populist rock group when they were always a bit spikier and more complicated than that - your piece articulates that point beautifully.

I never owned this album, though a housemate of mine used to play it a lot. Never a big U2 fan myself, but it is a good, solid album. The hits got a little overplayed on the radio, but what can you say?